Media platforms established by large globally acting organizations are collecting numerous amounts of data from the platforms’ users world-wide and, with it, are becoming more and more powerful, in particular in social media. The platforms are practically able to control all the major processes in today’s media, based on analytics of data they practically own. The talk will address this issue and possible ways out, elaborating related position and opportunities of European industry and society.

About NEM Summit 2019 program

Halid Hrasnica (Eurescom GmbH, Program Committee Coordinator)

16:00

Moderator: Morgan Bouchet (Orange, NEM Chairman)

16:00 – 16:30 Break

Plenary session on immersive applications and future media networks

Iconic Engine is a leading provider of an end-to-end XR solution, providing a complete workflow to power and serve the global XR industry. The company’s mission is to inspire and lead the next generation of interactive and immersive content, and its distribution, providing and supporting clients with complete solutions for: Location Based Entertainment (LBE) content and technology solution, Cloud-based, multi-tenant streaming technology, Content distribution marketplace, XR live broadcast production services, and Immersive and interactive content development. By leveraging Digital Domain’s 26 years of experience and legacy, combined with over $100 million in XR related investments, Iconic Engine strives to power and support clients XR and 5G strategies and initiatives well into the future.

19:00 – 23:00 Social Event

Thursday, 23 May 2019

Paralel sessions, 09:00 – 10:40

Session A-1

Artificial Intelligence for media and creative industries

Thanks to the Big Data revolution and increasing computing capacities, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made an impressive revival over the past few years and is now omnipresent in both research and industry. The creative sectors have always been early adopters of AI technologies and this continues to be the case. Simultaneously, the exploratory nature of the creative process is raising important technical challenges for AI such as the ability for AI-powered techniques to be accurate under limited data resources, as opposed to the conventional “Big Data” approach, or the ability to process, analyse and match data from multiple modalities (text, sound, images, etc.) at the same time.

The purpose of this session is to open a discussion on future technological advances in AI and their growing impact on creative industries, to provide a realistic perspective of the scope of AI actions in creative industries, to finally discuss different visions of how this technology could contribute to research and development works in such context. Questions for the community: Where does AI operate in creative Industries? What is its operative role? How will AI transform creative industries in the next ten years?

It is now clear that disinformation has real-world consequences; globally, most researchers and policy-makers agree about the need to better understand and tackle the production of false news, disinformation, and in general the online tactics of knowledge manipulation which undermine democracy.

The aim of the session would be a high-level discussion on impact of disinformation and effective strategies for tackling it. It will bring together different points of view to discuss present and future actions. Media industry will meet researchers and professionals to jointly discuss how to integrate different approaches to mitigate the problem.

10:40 – 11:10 Break

Paralel sessions, 11:10 – 12:50

Session A-2

New media formats

While the last NEM Summit has seen exciting presentations and results in both, visual and audible content, NEM Summit 2019 in Zagreb, Croatia, will focus on smart new formats for visual content. The photographic camera concept, invented even before Christ and having been made practically usable in the early 19th century, has been challenged especially by plenoptic imaging. With the first light field capture devices (single lens cameras) introduced early 2000’s there have been a lot of expectations. Computational imaging promised to enable high quality refocus and seamless multi-view experience, even beyond what is physically possible with a photographic camera.

Several problems, however, have led to the typical trough of disillusionment: Either the resolution of the devices has been too small, or, with sufficient resolution, the data rate to handle and store the captured content has been prohibitive. But due to the receiver remaining to be the human visual sense required resolutions for high quality photography and cinematography have been nearly constant over the years (4k in as well UHD-TV as digital cinema), while processing power, transmission bandwidth and storage space have kept following Moore’s Law. Consequently, a slope of enlightenment that the Gartner Hype Cycle foresees to succeed the trough of disillusionment is — at least — not unlikely. Consequently, the European Commission is funding several projects (H2020 RIAs and ERC Grants) dealing with light field imaging and its applications.

The New (Visual) Media Formats session will see several inspiring talks on different facets of light field capture and processing, followed by a panel discussion on whether plenoptic imaging could have the same disruptive influence that digital sensors had or it might be just a new hype without significant footprint in the future of New European Media.

Responsible research and innovation: Participatory, Inclusive and Accessible Media

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is an approach that anticipates and assesses potential implications and societal expectations with regard to research and innovation, with the aim to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation. As it grows in importance in H2020 calls addressing societal challenges, RRI approaches are likely to become a decisive aspect in Horizon Europe where industrial competitiveness is tightly interweaved to global challenges.

While media technologies contributes to shaping the world and have an extraordinary impact in the quality of democracy and in social cohesion, the notion of responsible media, and its implications throughout the R&D workflow from production to delivery, are often overlooked. This causes tensions with regulatory frameworks and lift barriers for market uptake and user acceptance.

Directives such as the refit of Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) and accessible web should find EU media industry ready and should be seen as an opportunity to turn what up to now was considered expensive and problematic into normalized and profitable services. Similarly, in order to grow competitive in a responsible way, media technologies ought to ensure social inclusiveness, representativeness and acceptability.

The keynotes and panel will give an overview on the RRI applied to media and content technologies. They will look into methods for levering collective creativity and intelligence through participatory design and social innovation approaches. Moreover they will analyze the latest EU funded research on accessibility technologies for interaction to content, as required by the AVMSD directive, in all formats and looking at alternative working scenarios such as crowdsourcing, or remote for a social, sustainable and inclusive society.

12:50 – 14:20 Lunch Break

Paralel sessions, 14:20 – 16:00

Session A-3

Interactive technologies – current state and challenges for the future

The special session is organized by the Coordination and Support Action XR4ALL (www.xr4all.eu). The aim of this session is to bring experts from XR community together and to discuss the current state and the future challenges of interactive technologies. Experts from the scientific community, XR industry, XR technology developers, applicants and end users as well as investors are invited to participate and contribute to the advancement of this emerging technology. We will discuss the most promising fields of applications for Europe for digital industry and digital transformation of industry and the associated research challenges.

Roundtable discussion with the speakers and audience on “Future challenges”

Session Chair: Oliver Schreer (Fraunhofer HHI)

Session B-3

Trigging Innovation for the publishing sector

There is a growing gap between the potential offered by new technologies and how much this potential has been understood and used in the growth of the publishing sector. In recent years specific paths of innovation and acceleration such as ContentShift, Frankfurt and Renew the book, Amsterdam, have tried to give an answer to what appears to be a widespread need in the sector: experimenting with new business models, rethinking the value chain in light of digital opportunities to innovate the production, circulation and use of content. In line with this, there is possible to see a transformation, already occurred in other media, regarding the role of the reader, who is gaining a more active role, also through the influence of social networks in the communication of new editorial products. The aim of the panel is to discuss some concrete cases, with a particular attention to the development opportunities for the sector in the next years.